About the Project

The history of the Industrial Home for Negro Girls, advertised in the poster above, sheds light on the racialized roots of the modern carceral system.

("Efland Home for Negro Girls." North Carolina Digital Collections. 1935. https://digital.ncdcr.gov/digital/collection/p16062coll13/id/6213.)

This project is an attempt to understand the historical trajectories of subjugation, stigmatization, and criminalization of Black women through the 19th and 20th centuries. Though criminalization took various forms at various times throughout this period, there was a unifying thread both of targeted racial exploitation and of organized Black resistance to it. Through this website, the authors explore four aspects of this seemingly disparate, but intimately connected history.

We begin with the history of juvenile penitentiaries and reformatories for Black girls to understand the conditions in which Black girls were mistreated and constrained into a social status that limited their progression beyond servitude. Through analyzing the records of the Philadelphia House of Refuge, the Industrial Home School for Colored Girls in Virginia, and the Industrial Home for Negro Girls in Efland, North Carolina, we can detect the beginnings of a carceral system that disadvantaged Black girls up until the current moment.

Our next article concerns the history of convict labor and convict leasing, dual systems that sprang up in the South at the turn of the century. In this, we explore the role that convicts and the overarching problem of labor played in the social, economic, and infrastructural rebuilding of the South after the Civil War. This article looks to situate the place of Black people, and Black women in particular, in that story.

To understand the ways in which criminalization extended beyond the realms of law and politics and into American culture, we discuss, too, how popular culture in the 19th and early 20th century was used as a tool for the carceral system in the United States. In the mid-19th century, the combination of the emergence of scientific racism, legal challenges to Black citizenship, and rising tensions about slavery and abolition led to the larger presence of stereotypes and caricatures about Black women. These stereotypes and caricatures that emerged as a way to justify the enslavement of Black women were then used to justify their oppression, and criminalization and tap into white fears about Black freedom after Emancipation. These controlling images were spread widely through their appearance in theatre, films, animation, radio, and in everyday household items.

In the mid-20th Century, the arrest of Rosa Lee Ingram and the subsequent court case became a lightning rod for Black political organization against the injustices for the US carceral system. Ingram's supporters are pictured above outside the Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles.

(“Supporters of Imprisoned Rosa Lee Ingram Gathered Outside the Offices of the Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles at the Time of Her Parole Hearing, ca. 1953.”)

Finally, we turn to organized Black resistance to understand the effects of racial criminalization in its many shapes. To do this, we review the case of Rosa Lee Ingram in the mid-20th century. This case study looks at the way in which Black women organized and campaigned for justice and the Ingram family’s freedom. Radical Black women’s groups such as the Sojourners for Truth and Justice and the National Committee for the Defense of the Ingram Family ‘advanced positions on race, class, and gender that were in many respects far ahead of the Community Party, civil rights groups, and women’s clubs’. Their goal was the elimination of all forms of oppression and remained at the forefront of advocating for Black lives.

Though forms of criminalization took on disparate appearances, they contributed to the common goal of circumscribing African American freedom, especially that of women, and continue to influence today’s culture of African American criminalization in various spheres. This long history of criminalization sits at the roots of modern day mass incarceration, ongoing negative stereotypes of Black people and Black culture, police abuse and the protests that oppose it. As activists and reformers look increasingly to the past to understand the present and prepare for the future, the significance of this history will only grow, as will the responsibility of historians to bring their work on this history to the public.